


Prince of the Forest

by bombcollar



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Interspecies Romance, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 01:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14683953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bombcollar/pseuds/bombcollar
Summary: A witcher finds gratitude within the sacred silence of the woods.





	Prince of the Forest

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, this is technically a crossover with Dark Souls 3 but there's not enough of that here for me to put it as a category. Lorian having monster boyfriends is a running theme in my AUs....

“Folks ‘round here call him the Prince of the Forest.”

“The Prince?” Lorian looks beyond, into the gray, foggy darkness of the woods. A leafless sea of narrow, spikey black trunks, straight and numerous as the bars of a prison. “Is there a King?”

“No, sir, it’s just what they call 'im.”

He’d seen the totems as he’d traveled the very outskirts of the woods, garlands of bone, offerings left by the trails. The heaviness of something unseen watching him from a distance. A leshy lived here, one who wanted to make it abundantly clear exactly who owned these woods, perhaps more than any other he’d encountered. If he was careful, it would leave him be. It was not his target. 

“Years ago, folks tried sending hunters in after it, witchers too… Nothin’ doin’. Couldn’t kill it. But…” The man taps his finger against the side of his skull, grinning knowingly. “We’ve got it figured out, see. Best be moving on.”

* * *

Through the smoke he finally sees it, bristling and skeletal, bare of its summer foliage, so tall it must walk on all fours. It digs its forelimbs into the dirt, carving a deep furrow to corral the blaze until the counter-fire Lorian started meets the one set by the poachers, and the two burn each other out. Lorian lays low to escape the smoke, eyes watering, unable to discern much of its form other than its massive size and the fact that it has two faces. Elk skulls with long, irregular antlers, four empty sockets, one central and one askew to its right. Never before had he seen a leshy with more than one head, but there’s little time to wonder at the significance. 

He tries to pick himself up, crawl to escape the smoke, but the winter winds blow it violently to and fro, choking and blinding him. As his consciousness fades he feels enormous talons wrap around his middle, lifting him into the air and carrying him away from the fire. The leshy sets him down again in a clearing, leaving him to gasp for breath and wipe his burning eyes and listen to its heavy footsteps retreat amid the firework pops and cracks as the fire exhausts itself.

* * *

The night is bitterly cold. Lorian awakens to the sound of many paws approaching, sniffing and panting, the smell of wolves. He grabs his sword, sitting up behind the canvas sheet he’d strung up in a hollow to shield himself and his horse from the wind, and waits. But they do not approach as if hunting, no wary circling or heads held low. They seem earnest, ears pricked, gathering at the edge of his camp and peering at him, as if waiting for permission to approach. 

Nestor snorts, ears pinned back and eyes rolling, and Lorian calms him so he doesn’t get up and bolt into the darkness. The lead wolf steps forward, even as Lorian’s grip tightens around the hilt of his sword, and lies down next to him. Several more follow suit, surrounding him in plush winter fur. One lays its large head in his lap, looking up at him with plaintive yellow eyes. The pack surrounds him, lending their warmth as placidly as a group of hunting dogs, and Lorian feels unseen eyes upon him once again as he settles back down to sleep.

* * *

In the morning he finds the gutted carcass of a wild boar waiting for him, placed by his cold campfire with care. Ravens pick at the offal set off to the side, but the rest of the meat lies untouched. The wolves sit and watch as he lights the fire again, cuts the carcass up, prepares breakfast for himself. Usually he didn’t eat meat of this sort, but it would be rude to refuse what was obviously a gift.

As he eats and watches the wolves share the rest of the carcass, he thinks. The taste of smoke still coats the inside of his throat and clings to his clothing. He’d be smelling it long after he left this place. Undeniably, the leshy had saved him from certain death by smoke inhalation, and he had saved its,  _his_ , forest. Should that have not made them even? Yet the leshy had sent his wolves last night, and left Lorian food he had obviously personally butchered, by the surgical clawmarks. It seemed much for such pragmatic creatures, who usually considered simply letting you pass through their territory alive to be a generous gift indeed. This Prince of the Forest had manners to match his royal title.

* * *

The village folk do not look upon him as he rides back through their narrow streets. Lorian was sure they’d seen many a witcher pass through, perhaps contracted to destroy their Prince. He explains to the elders what had happened, how he had not been involved with the poachers who’d burned the forest. They nod gravely to him, but it is not their judgement that matters here. In time, they say, they worry their Prince will be bested, and men like that, men who would see the forest burned to the ground to drive out game, they will be the ones to rule. Lorian can only agree. Eventually, the world will move on. There will no longer be a place for leshy, or for witchers.

He doesn’t mention the wolves or the gutted boar. The great cathedral of the woods stands silent as he passes from the village outskirts to the proper wilderness. Today is faintly warmer, sun glinting through the filmy clouds, warming the land just enough for fog to rise from the snow covering the ground.  

A mile outside of the village, the Prince shows himself, appearing from the fog and stepping out onto the trail, his movements nearly silent in spite of his wooden bulk. Nestor immediately balks and whinnies, tossing his head, but calms at a few strokes of his neck. Lorian slips off his horse’s back, boots crunching in the thin snow as he steps forward, fingers around his medallion, humming like a heartbeat.

Bare of greenery, bark skin gray and dormant, the Prince is a shade of what he might be. Lorian can only imagine him in proper bloom by his bristling mane, veins of dead ivy winding down his body and limbs, patchwork lichens. Soot still clings to him, dirtying the ivory bone of his face. _Faces_ , indeed, there are two and it was not a hallucination brought on by the heat. Were he to stand he would tower over most of his kind, and even on all fours he must lean down to meet Lorian’s eye. 

Lorian gazes back at him, hardly daring to breathe, feeling like his medallion was going to burn a hole down to his skin. It is impossible to read those empty, bony sockets, but if the leshy wished him ill he hadn’t shown it so far. Lorian notices one antler is snapped off on the right-side skull, leaving it lopsided. A recent injury. Slowly, he takes the corner of his cloak and wipes the soot from the Prince’s face, placing his other hand against his 'cheek’ to steady it. “I didn’t get to thank you,” he says, soft so as not to disturb the holy quiet of the forest. “I might have suffocated…”

The Prince lets out a small noise, like the creaking of a tree in a high wind, and leans closer, the cool bone of his snout against Lorian’s warm cheek. “I…” Lorian murmurs, then raises his arms, finding a place for them amidst the Prince’s branches, laying them across his neck. For a while he says nothing. These creatures demanded tribute, respect, they were territorial and deadly in their possessiveness. No leshy had ever felt anything close to gratitude. So the stories said.

Lorian moves to rest his forehead agains the Prince’s, sighing. “…I can’t stay. I have to keep moving. I’ll come back, though. I promise. Once it’s summer, and everything’s green again.”

* * *

Throughout the rest of his journey, ravens follow him, croaking from the branches of nearby trees and scratching in the dirt around the camps he makes, observing him with bright black eyes. He hears wolves baying in the distance, loping footsteps hidden in the brush, but nothing troubles him in the forest. Sometimes he wakes to find a slain rabbit waiting for him, or a pheasant, paw prints leading in and out of his campsite. 

It puzzles him for ages, long after he’s returned to the castle. As he lies in bed, many weeks after the encounter (though snow still lies upon the ground, it will be a long time before winter is over), his mind drifts back to the encounter, and he suddenly sits bolt upright. “Oh, gods.” He slaps himself on the forehead. “You were being  _courted_ , you stupid bastard.”


End file.
